Riddler
"Can you hear me? I know you can.' Yes, it is I, Edward Nigma, The Riddler and more importantly your intellectual superior. My genius has allowed me to easily hack into your primitive communications. My goal is simple! You complete a series of amusingly taxing challenges and, well, you'll see. I, The Riddler, have placed a dazzling selection of challenges and puzzles around Gotham. Can you solve them all? Will you find all my trophies? Are you ready to give up yet? Your puny mind is no match for my own."'' The '''Riddler is one of various criminals residing in Gotham City. A master strategist who incorporates riddles into his crimes, his signature gimmick is giving clues or hints to law enforcement. The riddles are a compulsive obsession to prove he is smarter than others, and this has made him a frequent enemy of Batman. History Early Life Edward Nashton was born into a broken home. His mother was absent and his father was abusive; Edward spent his entire childood being constantly belittled and called a moron by his father. In school, Edward was profoundly intelligent and would pass tests with apparent ease, something his father, out of jealousy, couldn't or wouldn't believe; he therefore attributed his success to cheating (supposedly catching him once) and started beating on him to keep him "out of trouble," or to stop him from lying. Out of the abuse, Edward developed a compulsion he has became known for: an endeavor to tell the truth to prove his innocence. Edward thought he had his chance to prove himself when a puzzle contest came up at his school. To increase his chance of winning, Edward committed his first crime and snuck into the building at night and practiced the puzzle until he had the winning solution. Putting it together as many times as he could until he could solve it with ease, he was able to win the contest and was awarded a riddle book as a prize. However, his father accused him of cheating and, upon being told the truth, still beat him for lying. The compulsion to tell the truth, even to his father, held up after the contest. Edward consumed himself in trying to become better, delving deep into his riddle book to increase his intellect. His obsession with riddles stems from this, but unfortunately the abuse was also a main factor that drove him mad and to a life of crime in his later life. Since that time, he has mastered puzzles, mind games, and riddles. Before the Mask Undeterred by his situation, Edward finally left home when he got older and becameaa carnival performer, using his skills to cheat carnival-goers out of their money. However, this began to bore him, and Edward longed for a greater sense of purpose. Seeking to uncover the worst setbacks in humanity, Edward learned to be a skilled engineering and computer hacking genius, and found employment as a member of the GCPD's Cyber Crime Division. He became convinced that Gotham's long history of corruption was the result of intellectual and moral failing rather than economics. The Enigma To "improve" the city's standing, Nashton, under the alias of Enigma, used an army of informants to collect a cornucopia of blackmail information about the city's most corrupt individuals. Enigma planned to hold onto this information for safekeeping, intending to use it as a trump card to trigger a chain reaction that would end in Gotham City's collapse. Enigma recognized the great risk in this, setting up multiple layers of fail safes that included: hiding his servers behind structures such as billboards, planting signal jammers inside the Gotham City Radio Towers, and establishing dozens of relays across the city. A year after the endeavor, Enigma finally acquired enough critical blackmail information to satisfy his plot. He hid all of the extortion data that he had collected all throughout Gotham, and afterwards became an informant and criminal profiler for the Gotham City underworld. During the events of The Long Halloween, Enigma's main employer was crime lord Carmine Falcone. When a serial killer known as Holiday began targeting Falcone's associates, Carmine hired Enigma to discover the killer's identity. However, the Riddler's results displeased Falcone, and the gangster even laughed at him, when the Riddler suggested that Carmine himself was the killer. The Riddler later became one of Holiday's victims, but much to the Riddler's confusion, was purposely left unharmed. Realizing he desired to make a bigger name for himself, and also that his continued criminal operations increased the risk of him being discovered, Enigma silently departed the GCPD and created a new identity for himself. Inspired by his former alias, he changed his last name to Nygma (stylized as E. Nygma, aka "Enigma"), and based off of his childhood interest and need to prove himself superior to others, crafted himself the new title of "The Riddler." The Riddler became a main adversary to the Caped Crusader, constantly testing his analytical abilities to their limits. Personality The Riddler has an obsession with riddles, puzzles, and word games. The character frequently delights in over-stating his "intellectual superiority" and on forewarning both Batman and the police of his capers by sending them complex clues. With this self-conscious use of a gimmick, Riddler's crimes are flamboyant and ostentatious. The Riddler is a criminal genius capable of extraordinary lateral thinking in decoding and formulating puzzles of all kinds. He was shown to have investigative skills that rival those of the Dark Knight. Riddler has a mental compulsion to tell the truth brought on by childhood trauma. This is also the same reason he had the shtick of leaving clues whenever he committed crimes. Inspired by Harry Houdini as a child, the Riddler is also quite calm and calculating when attempting to escape confinement. His riddles are in fact a bizarre obsessive compulsion; his attempts to stop himself from sending them has met with failure time and time again. This extends to the fact he cannot simply kill his opponents when he has the upper hand, but prefers to put them in a deathtrap to see if he can devise a life and death intellectual challenge that the hero cannot escape. However, compared to Batman's other themed enemies, Riddler's compulsion is quite flexible, allowing him to commit any crime as long as he can describe it in a riddle or puzzle. Appearance Edward Nygma is a human male of generally lean-average build. He has brown hair, grey eyes, and simple facial features accentuated by his glasses, making him appear as an intellectual. As the Riddler, he sports various outfits with question mark motiffs all over them; his most common public attire being a green suit with question marks, a purple tie with a question mark, and a bowler hat with a question mark. Skills/Attributes Despite having no superhuman abilities, the Riddler is a highly cunning criminal strategist. He is not especially talented in fisticuffs, but sometimes employs weaponry that exploits his gimmick. He is shown to be skilled with engineering, computers and hacking, and other forms of technology, confronting Batman with unique and elaborate deathtraps. He is also well known for being Batman's most intelligent adversary. Though he has been successfully captured on more than one occasion, Edward is an accomplished escapologist, and can think of over forty ways to escape his cell at Arkham Asylum. He is intelligent enough to never use any strategy until the time is right. Aside from his signature tendency for riddles, Nigma was also highly knowledgeable of people's metaphorical "skeletons" in their closets, dark pasts and secrets due to having amassed an extremely complex web of spies and informants in Gotham City. He is alo knowledgeable in psychology to some degree and anticipating people's next actions. Equipment The Riddler is well-known for a wide variety of unpredictable tools and weapons; all of these are themed off of riddles or questions. The Riddler's Cane The Question-Mark Cane is the only regularly used device in the Riddler's arsenal. A technologically advanced cane that has several systems built in, many remain unknown but those that have been identified include: *Remote-controlled systems built in to operate his gadgets and lair from a distance *Call for backup from loyal thugs *Discharge electric blasts powerful enough to paralyze an adult human for several minutes *Unique coding and functionality so that the cane cannot be used against him The Riddler's Trophie The Riddler's Trophie is a term given to various collectibles regularly placed around Gotham city. These devices are simple neon lamps shaped in the figure of a Question Mark, and are left in hidden, hard-to-reach locations to test the abilities of his foes. Hundreds of them have been collected by the GCPD and various groups and individuals, but the Riddler doesn't seem to ever run out of resources to make them, as the trophies are seemingly always replaced and sometimes swapped around, moving different places to confuse would-be collectors. Gallery Riddler 01.jpg|The Riddler Riddler 02.jpg|The Riddler, E. Nygma Riddler 03.jpg|Edward Nygma Riddler 05.jpg|The Riddler inspecting a Riddler Trophie Trivia *The Riddler's birth month, October, was selected based in the month of the character's first debut in comics in October of 1948. Category:Male Category:Human Category:Villain Category:Evil Category:Earth-1001 Inhabitant